A (0:01)

Hey there. Welcome to the Amy Porterfield Show. Once you quit with intention, really cool opportunities open up for you and I want you to experience that. So I want to share with you in today's episode, what are the things that I actually quit to finally scale beyond the seven figures. Sixteen years ago, when I left my 9 to 5 job to become an entrepreneur, I had this opportunity to work with Michael Stelzner. He was just starting Social Media examiner, which became a hit really quickly, but it hadn't yet launched. And he said, I've got some things that I could use your help with. If, if you want to contract a little as you leave your 9 to 5 job, that'd be great. And I did. And I soon became the community manager for for the Social Media Examiner Facebook page. And that was a big deal. That was a really great role because the group blew up really fast and I got to meet a bunch of people. I learned how to manage a community and I was active in there, so I was kind of building my name up a little bit. I even went to a few events on behalf of Social Media examiner and I got to meet tons of online influencers and people that were creating courses and memberships. And it was just a perfect world for me to be in right out of my 9 to 5 job. And I really appreciated it. Michael Selzner was a great mentor. I learned a lot and again, I met a lot of great people, which started to open some doors for me. I also took a contracting job with another company helping them launch their courses. So I was doing a lot of contractor work. I was a contractor for other people's businesses alongside of taking like one on one clients for social media. And what I realized is if I keep taking these jobs with other people, I'm never going to fully build out the business that I want. And so I remember the day so vividly. I remember where I was when I called up Michael Stelzner and I said, I'm going to need to step down from being the community manager of the Facebook group. I really need to focus on getting my first digital course I up and running our first successful one. At that point, I had already had that failed launch and I just wanted to focus on growing my digital course business. And so he was great about it and we are still friends to this day. But it was a big deal for me to say, I'm going to stop doing this. I it was a big deal because one, he was paying me and so that was going to be less money in my bank account at A time when I was still trying to figure it all out. But number two, there felt like there was a little clout with that job. Like it was cool, the people I was connecting with and they were in the space I wanted to be in and it was doors that were opening for me there. And so I was afraid that if I let go of this, I won't have those opportunities anymore. And I tell this story to say one, I did let go and I do think it was the best decision I've made. And I did focus more on building my business. And I did get to a place where, where my digital courses became my number one revenue generator. But in addition to that, I tell you the story to say, sometimes you need to quit really cool things, important things, money making things, in order to get where you really want to be in your business. Because sure, you can keep taking on these different clients or contracting like the way I did and make a lot of money, but you will never hit that freedom and revenue goal that you want to by continuing to work for other people and building other people's businesses. And so I wanted to talk about quitting today, but in like the very best way and really before we dive in, because I'm going to share five things that I quit to hit the seven figure mark. Before I do that, I want to take you back to two, 2013, just for a quick minute. So at that point, I had already stopped being the community manager or social media examiner. I was all in with my digital courses. I had been for a few years, like 2011, 2012, big years for me, building my digital course business, trying things, failing, experimenting, having some good launches, some bad launches. And 2012 was the year that I realized, wait a second, I need to learn how to do less but make more money. Like, I had way too many offers. I still had some clients I was trying to do way too much, which I often see when my Millie members, I have a program called the Millie Club. When my Millie members come into the club, I notice that many of them have way too many offers or they're juggling way too many things. And one of the things we do or I love to focus on is optimizing the offers that they have and, and making sure they're the right offers that they need to focus on. And some of them, some of my Millie members, I'll say let's designate the offer that you're going to put 80% of your effort in. And then the other offers can be ancillary offers, but they're not the main thing, that part's important too, to identify, well, what is my main offer that's likely going to get my biggest attention because that is the one that will grow. And so back in 2012 I started to kind of learn that concept. Less is more and more. And in 2013 I hit my first almost million dollar year. I just round up. I say, I never say it was my first million dollar year, I say it was almost $950,000. And that was a big deal. I wasn't working for anyone else. I was fully on my own at that point. I had officially started in 2010, so 2010, 11, 12, 13. So it took me a good four years to hit that almost milestone that I wanted to hit now. At the time things were still a little bit messy behind the scenes. I didn't have any systems, barely ran a team, meaning I had contractors, no full time employees, didn't really know how to hire or who to hire. If that feels familiar. I think that's very normal at that stage. And I was still operating like a one woman show. I was proud of how far I had come. Hitting a million dollar mark or almost. It's a very big deal. And you start to think differently, operate differently. That's why I have the Milli Club. The Milli Club is for women that are around 500, 600, even 700k, but they haven't yet hit that million dollar year. It's so much more than about the money. It's this milestone to say I did this and I'm operating at a different level now. And so that was a big deal to me, but I still felt really maxed out. And a lot of million members that come into my world wanting to hit that million dollar mark, they feel maxed out as well. So I think it's very normal and I like to normalize that because it's not like you're going to hit a million dollars in your business and everything clicks. It all makes sense. And now you have better problems to deal with. They're not always better, sometimes they're harder. You're just in a different mind space, which I think is important. But still it's a great milestone and it doesn't solve everything. So around that time is when something clicked. If I wanted to grow, if I really wanted to have a true seven figure business and beyond, and I wanted to sustain it, something had to change. Now if I jump to the punchline here, in 2014 I hit over $2 million. So I went from that 950k almost a million to I think it was $2.2 million in 2014. So it was a really big jump and I really attribute that to a lot of the things I quit along the way. So a lot of these things I started to quit in 2012, 2013 and definitely was on track with 2014. I've left these things behind in order to make way for this milestone I really wanted to hit. So to be clear, I did less to make more. And that is very true. I did less to make more and I wanted to share with you what it looked like. So overall, once I started quitting the right things with intention, that's when things started to really happen for me. And I thought this is an important episode to talk about. Whether you're just starting out and you haven't hit your first 100k or many of you are around like 100k to 500k or even beyond. Once you quit with intention, really cool opportunities open up for you and I want you to experience that. So I want to share with you in today's episode what are the things that I actually quit to finally scale beyond the seven figures. And with each one I'm going to share the behind the scenes story, the before and after transformation, and a coaching style question that you can ask yourself today. Because if you're anything like I was back then, you might be holding on to things that are quietly keeping you stuck. Okay, so here we go. The first thing I quit was I quit doing everything everything myself just because I could. Now you've heard this one before. It's not earth shattering new information, but it's so common that in the early years we just do everything because it feels safe. 1. It's scary to hire people. 2. We can do it better. 3. We're super busy. We have no time to train people. A lot of my MILLIE members will say like I know I need to off board this to something somebody else, but it takes way too long to train someone how to do it. And that is a trap that we get into where we make it mean that this intense time that we have to train them, we forget of the years and years of rewards we can get from actually doing that if we just slow down and spend the time teaching someone else. So again, just like maybe you in the early days, I did everything myself, but doing it all myself, you know what happens, right? It kept me in the weeds. So the shift I needed to make was I didn't just hire a virtual assistant and contractors to help. I started leading like a CEO and A founder, I started to document tasks, I started to build SOPS. I stopped being the bottleneck. And speaking of SOPS, with AI today you can literally create the fastest SOPS by just using the audio portion, let's say of ChatGPT, talking about every step you take to do something, having ChatGPT put it into an SOP and then you correcting it and making sure it's accurate. Like back in the day, obviously we did not have that tool and it took forever to create these SOPs. So highly recommend you use AI to do this. But I stopped being the bottleneck. So before everything ran through me, everything ran through me. After, when I started to figure out, wait a second, there's no badge of honor by doing it all myself. It's not strategic and it's like a low vibe decision. So afterwards, when I stopped doing it all myself, my business could run without me in so many decisions. So I didn't have to make every decision, which was like hallelujah, I could breathe and listen. I know hiring can feel scary, especially if you're not sure where the revenue is going to come from or you've had a bad experience with hiring. I want you to hear, we've all had bad experiences with hiring. I did just last year. Like you're going to continue to have some misses, but if you really, really get strategic, you're going to have more wins than not. So hiring does get easier and it's never perfect. But when I first started handing things off, I didn't have any full time employees. I didn't have a full time employee. I don't even know the year I want to say it was like 2017. So it took me a while to hire my first full time employee. But I did start treating my contractors with more intention. I made sure that they were in it, they were dedicated, they didn't have too many clients so that they could dedicate their time to what we were working on. And I created relationships with them. I treated them well. They loved working with me and I loved working with them. And they felt like they were actually real employees. I couldn't treat them like that. I mean, legally we have to be careful. And I was in California, so I really had to be careful. But yeah, I started with contractors, but I started to come from a mentality of this is my team. And I was wrong. It was in 2017 where I hired my first full time employee. It was 2015 and if you've an OG and you've been around for a while, you know that it was Chloe. And Chloe ended up being with me for seven wonderful, glorious years and we really got to build the team together. But I didn't hire my first full time employee until two full years after I crossed the seven figure mark. I don't think it's something you need to rush into. But again, the mindset shift is treating your contractors as though this is your team and you are the leader and you hold the vision and you're creating the SOPs in order to hand off some of these tasks so you can stay in the vision and get out of the weeds a little bit. At this phase, you're still in the weeds, but you got to get out of them and as much as you can. So please hear this. You don't need a full time team to start building like a CEO, but you do need to stop trying to do all of it alone. So that coaching check in, that question to ask is, what are you still holding onto in your business? Not because it's the best use of your time, but because it feels familiar or safe or dare I say it, you think you could do it better than everyone else. Maybe you can, but is that really where you should be spending your time? And also another question you can ask yourself is, what task are you still doing yourself even though deep down you know it's costing you growth in your business? For me, for years I edited my own videos in screenflow. I really should have given that up. It took me hours for all my digital courses. I edited all my own videos. If I could go back to, I would have stopped doing that a year at least before. Hey, real quick, before we continue, a quick word about our sponsor. I've got to tell you about a really cool model that I'm a little bit obsessed with right now. So it's called the working genius model. And I'm telling you it's going to transform your work, your team and your life. And really it will do so by leveraging your natural gifts. So it's an assessment that I recently took. It takes like 10 minutes and the results you can apply immediately. You're going to discover how to increase joy and energy at work by understanding what your geniuses are. And it kind of blew my mind because I thought, this makes sense why I do some things and I hate doing them and then I do some other things and it fully lights me up. And it actually gave me permission to stop doing the things that totally drain me because now I understand why they drain me. So it's really good. So essentially you're going to get more done in less time with more energy and joy. Yes, please. Right. So you can get 20% off a $25 Working Genius assessment if you go to workinggenius.com and just enter the code marketing at checkout. So you're going to get 20% off. It's 25 bucks. It's worth every penny, but you'll get a discount. Go to workinggenius.com and get and enter the promo code marketing at checkout. Okay, let's get back to the episode number two. I quit avoiding the numbers for too long. I told myself I'm not a numbers girl. I'm not good at numbers. In fact, I've told the story before. But in high school, I hated math and I dreaded every time I had to go into a math class and I wasn't good at it. And then in college, I learned that if I was a communications major, which is a little bit of a soft major, for the record, I only have one math class and it's statistics. And once I'm done with that, never again. I thought that was the coolest thing in the world. So that's how much I hated doing math. But the more and more I told myself I'm not a numbers person. I struggled with the numbers and that led to ignoring my metrics because I just wanted that pressure to go away. It's like if I don't see them, then I don't have to worry about them. We know that this is not the right way to go, right? So the shift I made is I started small. I created a simple spreadsheet and I had my virtual assistant update it weekly. So things like my email open rate or the number of subscribers on my email list, or different opt in conversions on opt in pages for my lead magnets. These are things that I just started with the things that I cared most about and, and I knew could move the needle. And also I started asking my bookkeeper questions. I stopped waiting to feel confident and I just built confident through asking questions, being present and being vulnerable enough to say, like, I don't know. So again, I tracked opt in rates, webinar conversions, revenue per promo. I started to track expenses for each of my promos, refund rates, cost per acquisition, things like that. And the list got bigger and bigger. But it started out really small and I quit being afraid to ask the beginner level questions. And now with ChatGPT, like, you don't even have to be embarrassed because chatty's not going to judge you. So you could Ask your questions there as well. But I think it's so important to ask questions and understand your numbers, like, really understand your numbers. So your willingness to be a little vulnerable and messy in the beginning so you can fully understand what's tracking in your business, what's working and not working, it goes a long way. So before I made decisions based on gut, and quite honestly, I was really lucky for a lot of those decisions. It was working for me. But as the business got bigger and I started to bring in contractors and eventually employees just going off, my gut wasn't working anymore. I wasn't the only one spending money. I. I wasn't the only one making decisions. It was risky. So after, like the before and after, I made decisions based on data that I understood. Now, it's never been, like, the strongest part of my business. So if you've heard me before, you've heard me say this. This year, one of my values. I'm a big fan of changing my values every single year in the business, depending on where I'm at, where my team is at, and where the industry is at. And. And this year, one of my values in the company is data into impact. So we use the data to make a bigger impact for my audience, for you, for my students. And so every decision, we say, well, where's the data? What do the numbers tell us? How did you get to this conclusion? Where are the numbers? And it's become a huge driver in the business. And I've seen significant cost savings and better decisions because of this. Okay, so one of the biggest reasons I started tracking numbers was because I had too many offers to be really honest. And so I was juggling multiple programs, all different price points, all requiring different marketing strategies, different marketing energy, and I had no idea which ones were really worth it. So I started tracking the data again. All the details, I said, and. And when the numbers didn't align with the time and energy or money or goals that I had for my business, I gave myself permission to retire those offers without drama. It's easy to say no to something when you can look at the numbers and say, this doesn't make sense. So if you're like, Amy, I don't know what to stop doing. Look at the numbers. They do not lie. They tell a story. Now, when I made that big decision back in the day to stop working with Michael Stelzner and I didn't have any numbers, that was a gut thing, and that was really a discipline thing. I had a goal to build my own courses and to make the revenue that way. And this was now a distraction. And it was a safe place that I knew was keeping me from really taking the next step. But when you're looking at numbers, you don't have to go with your gut. You don't have to ask yourself, am I just afraid to do it? No. Do the numbers tell you you should continue this offer or not? That is very helpful. Take away all the drama. So anytime I sunsetted an offer in my business, every one of those decisions, they were backed by data, not emotion. And that's what gave me the clarity and the confidence to just simplify the business, starting back in 2012 and then moving into 2013 and beyond. So I didn't need more offers. I needed the right offer. So I. So I had to quit some of those offers to give my focus to the offers that mattered. So here's a quick coaching check in. What's one metric you've been avoiding? And what would it look like if you got curious about it instead of intimidated by it? And the second question, if a CEO took over your business today, what numbers would they look at first? And do you know those numbers? If someone came into your business and they said, what is xyz? Would you be able. You don't have to memorize it, but could you go find it quickly? So that's another thing you want to ask yourself. So number three, I quit making my business plan in a vacuum. Now, I have said many times that when I left corporate, I had joined a mastermind right out of the gate. Marie Forleo's rich, happy and hot. And I actually stayed there for two years. But one of the things I didn't do, I just didn't know better and is I kept my business plan, my business ideas pretty close to the chest. I would share some of them, but I was insecure. So I thought, no one wants to know this or this isn't a great idea, or they're doing something bigger. I had a lot of imposter syndrome the first two years of being in that mastermind. And so I would create a business plan or a promo or some kind of new strategy, but I would still do it in isolation, even though I was part of a mastermind. I. But I realized that you can't scale inside of a silo at a certain level. You need new perspective, peer conversations, and strategic mentorship. I think the mastermind I was in, I think I took advantage of it in terms of really getting inspired by what is possible in learning. But it wasn't until a few years later that I was in different masterminds and I had matured as an entrepreneur that I realized, wait a second, Masterminds are the most brilliant place for pitching and catching. They're great for being vulnerable and saying, this isn't working. What have you done? Can we jump on a call? Like the people in the Mastermind, those relationships are so valuable. Sure. The facilitator who shares how they did xyz, so valuable. But the people in the group, if you really are mindful of creating those relationships and sharing just as much as you take in the group, it goes a long way. So the shift I eventually made was I continued to invest in masterminds, but I was more vulnerable, I was more open, and I connected with. They usually were all women. I connected with the women in a bigger way. In fact, I actually many, many years ago joined James Wedmore's Mastermind. And in that mastermind, that's where I met Jasmine Star. And so she has become a dear best friend to me. And. And this was many years ago, like over 10, I'm going to guess, but I could get my math wrong. But my point being is that by that point I had had a successful business and I realized these relationships, I had to foster them. I had to connect with people. People weren't just going to come to me. So I made a really big effort to become friends with Jasmine. And now almost every day, we talk about our business and what we're doing and we're very invested in each other's personal lives and families. So that's another thing. Masterminds, if you make friends and you put the effort in, not only are they going to help you build your business, but also find, like, lifelong friends. And Laura Belgray was another lifelong friend I found in a mastermind. And we have been friends for almost 15 years now. So it's just a cool thing, but you have to make the effort. So in these Masterminds, I got feedback on launches. I stopped guessing about if I was doing things right. I joined rooms that I was nervous to be in, but I told myself, we're going to uplevel, we're going to do this. I belong here, even though I felt like I didn't at times. So I've been in many masterminds, masterminds I paid for, and peer masterminds that we don't pay, but we get together as a group and we all pitch and catch. I've also invested a lot in coaching, and so I'm always going to be investing in myself and in my business. So before, my growth depended entirely on me figuring it out alone. After, when I realized the value of a mastermind and matured as an entrepreneur, I realized, oh my gosh, I'm doing this wrong. I need to take advantage of the sounding boards and the accountability and the strategies from people playing a bigger game in these masterminds and believe me, I did. So I quit playing small inside masterminds and and I started really showing up for people and they showed up for me. So for you, here's the coaching check in. What would it look like to stop white knuckling your way forward and finally join the room where the next level conversations are happening? It's scary. It's an investment. You have to spend the money. Sometimes you take a risk, but I promise you it is business changing. Also, another question you could ask is whose advice are you trusting right now and do they actually have the results you want? And do you have access to the details to get you the results that you want? Are they sharing it? Do you have these intimate conversations? Do they keep you accountable? That's the beauty of a mastermind. And if you're at all interested in the Millie Club, it's for women that are making around 500k or more and their goal is to get to their first million dollar year. So some of them are making 500k, some of them are making 800k, but their goal is to not just hit a million but but keep it sustainable so that they can do it year after year and grow. So if you're interested in being in the Millie club, just go to amyporterfield.com MillyWaitList and Millie is M I L L Y milliwaitlist okay, so number four is I quit launching without Evergreen in mind. So I've ran live launches since the get go. I've ran them over and over again until I knew exactly what worked. The messaging, the timing, the objections, the conversions. Like I dialed it in, I I could anticipate every question that was going to be asked. I had the answers and I felt really confident. And then from there I decided I'm not going to quit live launching, but I am going to add Evergreen. So basically I quit launching without Evergreen in mind as well. Because with Evergreen, once you get good at live launching, I think everyone should start out with live. I think there's a lot of pitch and catch with your audience. You learn in real time you're a better entrepreneur when you can think on the fly. There's just a lot of great lessons in live launching. However, once you've done it a few times, you could take that refined repetition that you got really good at and turn it into a repeatable, scalable system. So Evergreen, a few signs to know if you're ready. So number one, you've launched the offer a few times and and you have a clean, consistent roadmap of how you did it. So you know the data. Also, you've tested your messaging live and you know that it converts and you know what doesn't work as well. And so that way, when you turn it on, Evergreen and Evergreen is so incredible, but you do need to know what's worked before so that when you do turn it on, you can have success pretty quickly. You don't have to do it that way. But starting with Evergreen, tinkering and making it work is a lot harder. I like starting with live and moving into Evergreen and I also like having both. I have both in my company and that way I have the live experience, which is a quick cash injection, and then the consistent revenue, which is Evergreen. Two different products in my business. But I love to do it that way. So a quick check in for you. Ask yourself what offer in your business has earned the right to go Evergreen, where have you really worked on it? And now you can move it to Evergreen so you don't need to live launch if you don't want to. Or ask yourself, if you had to turn one offer into Evergreen, let's say next month, what would need to happen first? Like what are you willing to experiment with? Try now so you could eventually get it to Evergreen. Just something to think about. All right, we're in the home stretch. Number five. I quit building without a repeatable system. So before I hit seven figures, every launch felt custom to me. I wasn't really in that mode of I'm going to create this course once and launch it over and over again. I had experimented with that, but each time I did, I thought I needed to create a whole new webinar and all new emails and record the course over. And I thought, well, this is horrible. And I hate starting from scratch. I hate any experience starting from scratch. How do I make this easier? So the shift I made was I started documenting what was working. I did launch debriefs after it was over. I created those sops for the launches. I had templates for things. I started using old data to make new decisions for the new launch. But I didn't start over on everything. If the webinar did good, I used the same Webinar or I made it better, but I didn't start from scratch. The emails, I used all of them again, if it made sense or just tweaked a few. Same with social media. I could reuse social media if I launched, let's say a few times a year. So this helped me immensely. I stopped starting from scratch all the time and I took an offer and I would launch it over and over again. Heck, I still do that today with Digital Course Academy, which I just got done launching. I, I have launched that course since 2019. The same course, Digital Course Academy. Of course I iterated, of course I make it better every year, but I never start from scratch. And I think that's a really cool feeling. It gives you margin way cheaper. If you don't always start from scratch, it gives you momentum so you don't feel stuck at the beginning and a lot of peace of mind. So when I go into Digital Course Academy, I know it's going to be successful. I. I've proven it over and over again. Okay, so a quick check in for you. If you had to launch something two weeks from now, would you have a system to follow or would you be rebuilding everything starting from scratch and only you really have all the information to do it? That's another thing. Documenting it means you don't have to do it alone the next time out. And also if you think about offers, you have what is something that you could offer again and again? If instead of starting from scratch, what is something you could focus on and say, okay, every year I'm going to get better and better. And that's how you become known for something. So when you become known for something, you make more money. That helped me get to my first million dollars and beyond. I became known for teaching people how to create webinars and then teaching people how to create courses and then teaching people how to create courses and launch them, kind of combining those two concepts. But I became known for it because I would do the launch over and over and over again. And I do think that's part of my secret to success. I became known for something and it was easier to market and easier to sell when that happened. Okay, so those are the five things I quit. But before I let you go, here's what I want you to do. I want you to choose just one thing that you're doing right now that you know you should let go of. Or you could let go of and ask yourself, honestly, is this helping me grow or just keeping me safe? Is this helping me grow or is it keeping me safe? And number two, I want you to start a simple weekly CEO spreadsheet. Everyone listening right now should have a CEO spreadsheet. Even if you don't feel like a CEO, if you have your own business, you're your CEO. And so with that, I want you to track one number that you feel like could move the needle. If you focus on this number and you start to see it increase, get really intentional about increasing that one data point. After you do that, then you can add more as you go. But that CEO spreadsheet should start today and I want you to check in on it every single week. Start simple. You can add to it as you feel more confident. And if this episode hit home for you and you're around that 500k mark or even a little bit more, but you haven't yet had your first million dollar year, then I want you to check out the Millie Club. It's not open right now, but it is going to be open soon. It's for 30 women at a time, so I only take 30 women in a cohort because I'm very, very engaged in the group and we do live events. So it's a small group. But if you want to get on the waitlist and hear about it when it does open, just go to amyporterfield.com millyweightlist that's M I L L Y Millie Waitlist. All right, my friend, thanks for tuning in and I hope you found value in this episode. Talk to you soon.